Rarely has a president been surrounded by such an array of toadies and lickspittles, operating beyond their competence in an atmosphere of organizational chaos.
—
Eliot A. Cohen,
The Atlantic,
1 Apr. 2026
Like the most treacherous toadies from literature — Iago, Wormtongue, Tywin Lannister — Miller managed to shove aside rivals to latch onto his master’s ear and guide him toward more evil.
—
Gustavo Arellano,
Los Angeles Times,
29 Jan. 2026
Xi’s brand of resentful nationalism, meanwhile, comes with a strong anti-American streak, and security apparatchiks see CIA spies everywhere.
—
Andy Browne,
semafor.com,
28 Apr. 2026
The group ventriloquized the voices of authority—parents, school principals, cops, military officers, judges, politicians, newscasters, Soviet apparatchiks—and turned them into expressions of mass insanity.
—
Andrew Katzenstein,
The New York Review of Books,
19 Mar. 2026
Newsom and other governors have repeatedly denied parole to his closest acolytes, though an appeals court overturned Newsom’s veto of the release of Leslie Van Houten in 2023.
—
Richard Winton,
Los Angeles Times,
14 Sep. 2026
When the dazed young woman reels off quotes from an obscure self-help book, her new acolytes take her words as gnomic wisdom.
Rarely has a president been surrounded by such an array of toadies and lickspittles, operating beyond their competence in an atmosphere of organizational chaos.
—
Eliot A. Cohen,
The Atlantic,
1 Apr. 2026
Firmly in control of the nation’s massive federal apparatus, MAGA and its Republican lickspittles in Congress have thrived on chaos.
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